Wednesday, 12 June 2013

Forget Prism and the National Security Agency. The real threat to your privacy is you.

The Irish Times - Wednsday 12th June 2013

It took the rest
of us the entire history of the human race to decide our social norms – and
Mark Zuckerberg just a few hours to toss them aside

By reading this article online, you agree to
certain terms of service. They include adhering to community standards,
permitting the use of cookies, and consenting to surrender your soul in
perpetuity to The Irish Times and all its third-party partners.

You’re still here – in which case, like the
other 98.4 per cent of us, you’ll have skipped everything after the words
“terms of service”. (If you’re one of the 1.4 per cent who, according to a
survey by UC Berkeley, actually reads the terms of service, we were lying about
the perpetuity bit. You can have your soul back in 2027.)

For all that we harp on publicly about privacy
infringements and data mining, the vast majority of us neither know nor care
which new frontier in the privacy wars is being breached when we visit a
website or download an app, so long as it amuses us for more than three
minutes.

So yes, recent revelations that the American National
Security Agency (NSA) is mining the internet and phone data of
millions of the world’s citizens are a bit of a worry – but not nearly as
alarming as the information we willingly surrender about ourselves several
times a day.

The reports, in case you missed them, revealed that
the NSA has for the past seven years been logging every phone call, email,
search history, live chat, video call, upload and download in the US.

President Barack Obama
described this as a “modest encroachment on privacy” – and I agree with him.
What the NSA is doing may not be reasonable or justified, but compared to some
of the stuff most of us willingly and unthinkingly give up in the name of commerce,
it’s still pretty small fry.

I use the word “us” advisedly – anyone who
thinks this is just an American story probably hasn’t grasped the “global” part
of “global intelligence gathering”. If you’ve ever made or received a call to
or from someone in the US, or used an American-based server to access the
internet, then yes, somewhere in the Utah
desert, there’s a data server with your name in it.

But take my advice, and forget about it. Because
the real threat to your privacy is you.

When Facebook
made controversial changes to its privacy policy in 2009, turning data that had
been private into public information overnight, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg
gave us a frank insight into how things were going to be from there on in. “We
decided that these would be the social norms now,” he said. That’s right: it
took the rest of us the entire history of the human race to figure out what
norms we would like to impose on our society, and Zuckerberg just a few hours
to toss them aside.

That’s the point at which we should have started
manning the barricades, or at least deleting our Facebook accounts. But we
didn’t. We worried about the idea of a 25-year-old former frat boy with a
penchant for fleece setting our social norms for roughly a week, and then we
forgot about it.

Since then, Facebook, Google,
Apple and the other giants of the online world have been busily redrafting our
social norms at regular intervals. In the summer of 2010, an academic article
by UC Berkeley about a then-new concept called “geotagging” – software which
allows your phone to use its GPS to record your exact location when you publish
something online – prompted a rash of news articles highlighting the dangers of
oversharing.